Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume III - Historiaonceib ...

182 The new approachescan be measured. The modern solution destroys in the end even theidea of a value-standard that would be independent from the given. 25The correspondence in terms of political form of this realisation of minimisedhappiness – satisfaction through general recognition – is the universal unitarystate. Such a state, therefore, is also said to be the goal of the historical process.If the universal unitary state is the goal of history, then history isabsolutely ‘tragic’. Its attainment will reveal that the problem of thehuman being and, in particular, the problem of the relationship betweenphilosophy and politics is insoluable. For centuries, human beings haveunconsciously done nothing more than to clear its path through endlessefforts, struggles and suffering, continually hoping for the universal andunitary state; yet once they have attained the goal of their journey, theywill be forced to concede that they have destroyed their humanity byarriving at the goal of their humanity, and thus will have returned in thecycle to the pre-human beginnings of history. 26In the collapse of philosophy into politics, the specifically human is surrendered:freedom in contingency. The breaking-through of human limits presumesthe acknowledgement of those limits; such a break-through, however,is aborted by the restriction to the animalic that is suggested by the conceptof limitlessness. In such an order, philosophy can reconstitute itself only inthe Nietzschean sense, as nihilism, and this by rejecting this illusoryminimalist solution. 27Leo Strauss exposes the structural identity between ‘left’ and ‘right’tyranny here. In both, attempts to overcome human contingency bringhumanity itself – human nature – to an end rather than contingency. Atyranny that becomes universal and permanent means the end of philosophy.This is because it makes the claim of philosophy without accepting thecondition of the possibility of philosophy in the first place: the recognitionof human historicity, of human contingency, and thus of the freedom toattempt continually to break through it. Both right and left tyranniesemerge with the claim to overcome history: the leftist Hegelians (as representedby the person of Kojève) bring history to an end by guiding it to itsfulfilment in the philosophy of history. 28 The rightists (as represented in theform of National Socialists) create for themselves a unique historical positionby declaring their historical situation to be incomparably absolute. Theythereby rob the human being not only of his historicity but of his commonnature with that portion of humanity that appeared in prior epochs. 29In both cases, the possibilities of technology are enlisted to transcend preciselythis contingent nature of the human being. The ‘tragic’ element lies inthe reality that these limits are not truly overcome. In merely destroying thosephenomena that demonstrate limits (other classes, other races), technologyerects only the illusion of having transcended contingency.